El concepto de innovación social: ámbitos, definiciones y alcances teóricos

Abstract

En el presente trabajo se pretende, haciendo uso de la revisión bibliográfica sistemática, abordar una triple tarea. Por un lado, hacer un intento de clarificar terminológicamente el concepto de innovación social a través de una sistematización de las principales definiciones que sobre este concepto nos encontramos en la bibliografía. En segundo lugar, pretendemos llevar a cabo un seguimiento de como la definición del concepto se ha visto afectada por los diferentes momentos y contextos históricos en un intento de determinar posibles tendencias comunes, para terminar, en tercer lugar, poniendo de manifiesto cómo el concepto de innovación social se ha proyectado en diferentes disciplinas.

Social innovation is a field of study that in recent decades has been occupying an increasing interest both by academic institutions by organizations linked to the field of organized citizenship or by the public administration itself. This interest has been stimulated by a social, economic and civilizing scenario in which the incapacity of the classic mechanisms to cover the basic social needs, to respond to the new social demands or to dynamize processes of social change of a more structural character was discovered. The interest in what have been called "practices of social innovation" had already been announced in the last decades of accelerated change, in which certain social structures have been dismantled and replaced by others. The economic and financial crisis that characterized the change of decade has certainly accelerated this process